General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 457

wow, very relevant post

 

Canadian spectating here.

holy fuck

Donald Trump Jr. compares refugees to poisoned Skittles

 

This should be a HUGE deal, but media still refuses to go hard at him.

 

Terror suspect's father: I turned my sun into the FBI two years ago.

TrumpBots: If there are "good Muslims", why aren't they doing anything and telling authorities about all their terrorist buddies?!?"

 

Love that Mr. Owl is verified

 

Branegelina's death is clearly a way more important story /s

 

Real talk: if I were to have any capitalist run my business, Mark Cuban would be near the top of the list. Regardless of his libertarian leanings, the guy's business acumen is outstanding and his writings on business philosophy are outstanding.

 

I've said he represents a danger. That much is certain. My point of contention is we have to expand our analysis beyond his stated platform and look at the broader social forces in order to understand the extent to which Trump's policy objectives are achievable. By social forces, I'm referring to institutions and organizations that objectively have power within a given social formation, e.g., representatives of the military industrial complex, big capital, and so forth. When that is taken into consideration, the various sectors of American political power tend to align more with Clinton than with Trump, and, in fact, many of them have endorsed her. Has it not just come out that HW Bush will likely be voting for Clinton? Conversely, Trump hasn't the same amount of support among those forces within society, which makes his ability to actually craft consensus and push legislation more complicated.

We would not be talking about the alt-right if the republican base hadn't been more radicalized over the past four years. We would not be as concerned about Trump if something hadn't fundamentally changed within the conservative landscape. For example, the National Review releasing a document dedicated to stopping Trump, where they've typically accepted whatever establishment nominee was given to them. Similarly, there was another article by a conservative arguing that they no longer should placate the white, working-class, that the conservative movement needs to be honest about them and let those communities die, because they are responsible Trump. I don't agree with the thesis of it, but it is indicative of a battle within the conservative movement over its direction. Nowhere was this more evident than during the primary, in which time after time we were told Trump would fade, but the electorate kept shunning the establishment in favor of the more radical candidate. This is not to say that these aren't the same voters, it is to say that these voters have fractured the idea of the southern strategy and have essentially decided to dismiss all pretenses towards not being racist. The other thing is the extent to which they're more comfortable with the white nationalist elements being a part of the campaign, as opposed to the damage such a revelation would have caused years ago.

As to your point about the two party system, your assumption actually reifies the political realm, rather than taking it as a field of contestation, in which the right has been actively undermining progress made in previous eras that had different centers of gravity. There is something that can be done about this, it isn't pre-given. Whether it is the reformist technique of change from within or the idea of change from without, it requires actually staking out core platforms and building outward from that particular point. In many ways, this is what Trump and the alt-right have done, whereas liberals have preferred outrage without any sort of challenge or alternative narrative.

I don't disagree with the threat, I disagree with how to address it. Whether we like it or not, what he has unleashed is here to stay and we need to fight it. I don't think electoral politics will be the venue in which to do that. Further, as I've stated in the past, I don't think that we are powerless if Trump becomes president. The fatalist's view only makes sense if they perceive the Trump's presidency as being a mechanism for disempowerment, whereas that is typically the terrain of the democratic party.

Suffice to say, providing a bedrock on which your base can coalesce that isn't anything other than vague centrism is one of the ways in which to dictate the conversation, mark out spaces to the left and create a narrative in which those core values can be translated to independents in a very tangible way.

And yet, for the most part, the narrative is the same: experience, ready for the 3AM call, etc.

You cannot have it both ways. One cannot hold the belief that a particular candidate, far more than any other, represents a danger to the republic and then not interrogate the conditions that might actually make that possible. Putting that aside, I think there has been a dramatic shift in the political landscape when I look at the political activities happening on the ground, the ability of someone with the term "socialism" attached to them actually being a viable candidate, the fact that the major portions of both of the Clinton's legacy has been rejected (the crime bill and welfare reform), and then Trump. As for polarizing her base, that is not the end unto itself, but by polarizing one's base around core left issues, one can actually build consensus in that way. One looks at Trump and he essentially polarized his base, thereby consolidating his coalition and projecting it outward in such a way as to forcibly push the center of gravity to the right. Even the media, of which you've been critical, has accepted the parameters of his debate. My point of contention is that Hillary needs to polarize her base as a tactic for a broader shift within the discourse. It is precisely because she is a centrist that she's proven incapable of doing so.

I think this speaks more to the weakness of the democratic party as an advocate for progressive causes, as well as Obama and Clinton's track records. This is what is not being understood: The right has offered a narrative for people who have been left behind by the economy, who have no resources, who are hanging onto the idea of a middle-class without actually being of it, whereas the democrats have not. The democrats have not even offered anything better in terms of vision. If one looks at Obama's economic policy, it has been strictly that third-way, right of center, top down policy that has existed for the past few decades. The idea that republicans have been preventing them from being more progressive just doesn't fly here. Even when speaking in terms of the minimum wage, efforts for unions and so on, they've been largely out of step because of the people to whom the actually owe allegiance. We can continue to look at trends superficially, then come to conclusions that people merely go to the right for reasons other than their material conditions, or we can actually look at the policies that radicalize and cause that drift. From Bernie to Trump, the issue in this election has been the unresponsiveness of institutions to the actual plight of people on the ground. While we can feel comfortable reposting tweets of Trump's idiocy or that of his followers, ground has already been ceded in terms of coming to terms with how this came to be and how it can be remedied. Political phenomena doesn't come out of nowhere, it is, as always, historically rooted in the structures, tendencies, and ways in which we reproduce ourselves as people. As it is now, we are living in an era where precarity is ubiquitous and security is in short supply.

The extent to which he has been able to use identity politics certainly isn't surprising, but, again, being that racism is foundational to this country and anti-blackness is an integral element to its continued existence, we need to see how it is being deployed in order to understand it. That is to say, whilst racism has semi-autonomous functions, it also has organizational elements that objectively refer to the dispensation of resources, opportunity, access to affordable housing, jobs, etc. As such, I would argue that there are real, material losses that have been experienced within the white electorate, which haven't actually gone to people of color, but which have simply been eliminated by the needs of capital. As the system itself cannot come into question in our discourse, what takes its place is the "imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence', which is the racialized body as the thief of the American dream. This isn't to excuse their racial animus or to be an apologist, but it is to say that we cannot react to their racism as merely ideas in their head, feelings they have and so on; rather, it is an ideological response to their actual conditions of existence (high levels of economic inequality, for example), which is legitimized through, for example, Obama deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, Clinton saying super predators and helping to build up the carceral state, the drone bombings, indiscriminate wars, etc. The political realities that currently exist, then, accept the premises of the Other as disposable, as criminals and so forth, thereby entering into a reciprocal relationship with those fears of white people and allowing them to be reproduced across various discourses, one of which is Trumpism. To your other point about the lack of enthusiasm, I've seen various reports about the gap existing among black millenials. The response is that, perhaps, they just don't understand what Trump can do or something like that. I tend to disagree. The reality is, for quite a large number of us, we live in Trump's America and have for decades. You think that the lack of fear equates to not taking him seriously, or misunderstanding what he represents, where I would argue that, democrat or republican, the story of black and brown bodies has remained the same and, in fact, has gotten worse under both parties. So, when you put it to me or others, who despise or are skeptical of Clinton, that we don't fully grasp Trump's danger, the fact of the matter is we do and its been both liberals and conservatives who have made that danger ever-present in our lives over the years.

 

Pence doesn't get why people are so offended by a metaphor. Real problem is still all the refugees!

 

Eh. It did make more sense in context of the feature. I read that the other day.

 

Monmouth FL poll looks good. Not too many polls so far this week. Expected more. Can't see much of a trend line. Quite a few states I still want much more from.

 

If you like polls and data this was interesting:

 

Clinton hasn't won over millennials. And no, sexism isn't to blame | Kate Aronoff

 

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Faron has praised Tony Blair. Really bizarre for a party who are said to be targeting the young labour vote.

 

NV +3 (T)
NC +1 (T)
Maine Tied

Hmm. Mediocre polling day for Clinton so far.

 

Pretty good article.

 

This sounds great until you realize that millennials are more likely to approve of the job Obama is doing.

 

A serious presidential candidate in 2016 that may actually win the election.

 

I had to Google for this, because I remembered reading it 4 years ago ... so I have no idea if the poll would hold up today, but I remembered reading it:

"A poll taken on the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement finds that only 26% of respondents ages 18-29 would prefer protesting Wall Street over working on Wall Street."

Edit: From 2016:

These priorities are largely in line with those of the general voting public. A February report from Gallup found that both Republicans and Democrats prioritize economic issues and national security when voting for president, with government regulation of Wall Street "below average in importance to both parties." The economy also topped the list in a survey by news provider Next Avenue of 3,400 readers, most of them over 50. (Health care beat terror.)

The big difference between millennials and their elders seems to be whether they will vote at all. In a Pew Research Center survey, 69 percent of eligible Baby Boom voters said they had voted in the 2012 election, as had 61 percent of Generation X voters, while only 46 percent of eligible millennials had gone to the polls. When the Harvard survey asked how likely millennials were to vote this November, just 47 percent said they were "definitely voting," with additional 29 percent in the "maybe" category.